Seacom has secured alternative capacity options for its customers, but Internet service providers will be charged a “small premium” to use them.
A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya cut off many Internet users on Monday, with repairs expected to take a week or more.
The cable also suffered downtime in April when the Sea-Me-We 4 cable in the Mediterranean was cut. Seacom is leasing capacity on Sea-Me-We 4 until it can get a section of its cable through the Red Sea lit up.
In the meantime, the cable operator has secured capacity on other international systems and allowing its customers access to this. However, they will have to pay Seacom over and above what they normally pay for access to it.
“There is a cost attached to implementing short-term restoration capacity,” says Seacom SA GM Martin Sanne.
“This is dependent on the types of services required but typically the cost would be a small premium above what customers would normally pay for their capacity as part of an ongoing agreement,” he says.
Seacom will not share the exact costs or say which cables customers can now use.
MWeb, meanwhile, has moved about 30% of its customers onto Telkom’s Saix network, which uses Sat-3 along Africa’s west coast. In a note to its customers on Thursday, the Naspers-owned service provider says Telkom will not hand over more capacity to the company because of its commitments to Fifa for the rest of the World Cup.
In a note to customers, Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions, one of the service providers hit hardest by the Seacom outage, says it is holding out for new cable systems to help improve redundancy.
“Disruptions like this one should become less commonplace as cable operators and telecommunications companies will be able to route traffic along other cables,” Internet Solutions says. — Candice Jones, TechCentral
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